September 22, 2006

Oh, my friends, are you in for a treat. Today's Unplayable 45 is vlogged.

And what a very vloggy vlog it is:

Some links to help you with that vlog. Here are the lyrics to "Here Comes the Night." And here are the lyrics to "Brown Eyed Girl," the song that came on the 60s channel as I emerged from the parking garage this evening and made contact once again with the satellite. Here's the episode of BloggingHeads.tv with David Corn and Byron York arguing about "Hubris" that somehow has something to do with this. And here you can find and explanation of what "snowball sampling" is. Hey, it all fits together in the vlog.

Anyway, back to the 45. Since I can't play it, I wanted to buy it on iTunes to relive the experience of listening to it, but all they had was a karaoke version of the Them recording. That was disappointing but enough to make me remember why I liked this enough to buy it. The guitar hook is quite profound. But I remember regretting spending my money on this, because I didn't like the sound of Van Morrison's voice. I never learned to like it later. I don't doubt that he's an excellent singer. There's just a tone to it that I find unappealing.

And I especially didn't like it back when I was a teenager. He sounded too much like an adult, like those soul singers with their heavy voices who were always singing about way too serious adult relationships. The ultimate example of a song of that kind for me was Percy Sledge singing "When a Man Loves a Woman." I could tell it was good, but I could not identify with what was going on there, with people deeply emotionally distraught about love problems. The adult quality was -- judged by the hippie ethic of my generation -- square. Love, love, love -- it should bring joy and universal good will -- none of this grasping and suffering.

Well, if you object to Morrison's voice, how did you like the Shadow of Knight's version of "Gloria"? The best cover of a Van Morrison song? John Mellencamp's "Wild Night" is also pretty good.

Surely "Wild Night" didn't sound too adult when it was originally a hit? Certainly about turmoil, but not about serious relationships.

Morrison has been all over the place musically. The rock critics have traditionally been enamored of the album "Astral Weeks". I like it, but can't understand how it belongs among the best ever, even if you stop ranking in 1970. But then, I don't see what is so exciting about "Citizen Kane" either.

Having watched the Vlog, and hearing the Prof's delivery of a portion of "Brown Eyed Girl" (that is a great lyric, isn't it?)it connects to the discussion of the "Let's Spend the Night Together"/"Let's Spend Some Time Together" incident. There is video of Jagger singing the "clean" version on Ed Sullivan, with a truly priceless expression of disgust on his face.

There was a radio version of "Brown Eyed Girl" which had "making love in the green grass" removed and something like "laughing and a runnin, hey, hey" instead. Very similar, if not identical, to the lyric about the waterfall. I even have a greatest hits disk that has the "clean" version.

It is interesting now that many, many songs have two versions for this reason. I really love a song by Liz Phair called "Why Can't I" which contains the big obscenity of modern english. However, being a middle aged guy I could not understand what she was saying. One night I was listening to the song through earphones and suddenly realized what the couple in the song had not done yet. I now have the "edited" rather than the "explicit" version.

Patti Smith prefered because you are a feminist? I have never thought much of Ms. Smith, except her version of "Because the Night" would probably be among my twenty favorite songs of all time. Certainly a contender for such status. Far better than Springsteen's or 10,000 Maniacs' versions.

Rob: Ugh! I became a big fan of Patti Smith when I saw her by accident at a club back when she was doing poetry readings but at one point broke into the song "Gloria." It was the coolest thing I ever saw. I'm not interested in later Patti Smith and "Because the Night" isn't anything to me. I basically like the first album. I have a single too. Maybe I'll scan it tomorrow.

When I first saw the Parrot record label on that 45, what came to mind was Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "The Monster Mash," which was recorded on that label (along with a lot of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck...the pop singer, that is, not the classical composer).

When I first saw that Parrot come up, I was startled and frightened. I've only got dial-up here, so it materializes slowly. By chance, I've been calling some people "Parrots" on another blog, so I was wondering if they had me surrounded. I was also relieved to see it spelled the same way I did.

Speaking of new terms (somebody did), could somebody please come up with a better term for a vlog than "Vlog"? Or is it too late? It sounds . . . Russian. (A Russian typo? The Vloga Boat Song?) Vlog the Impaler. And now "pzizz," like "Pnin."

It also sounds like what was done to Jesus in "The Passion of the Christ," which can also be part of an obscenity -- "Vlog the Dummy"? (Very funny link, if you can stand it. Adjusting the antenna?)

Suppose you could call it a Tublog, but that sounds like a Danish beer.

Sippi: Thanks for the clip, painful though it is. Badly played and sung, and the guy that introduces them makes a child molestation joke.

I think this song is a lot like the Yardbirds, which is a band I really did like. So I don't really have a coherent theory. I was going to say that I disliked a heavy, humorless presentation of love relationships, but I wasn't consistent about that, for whatever reason.

The early Van Morrison song I liked a lot was "Domino," which was danceable (a big criterion for me), but I never understood the lyrics. It just now occurred to me that it's not 1970 any more (thinking about an old song takes you back, if you're tech-tarded and don't have an iPod) and I can Google them. So here they are. I still don't understand the chorus, but this says it's a tribute to Fats Domino.

Van and BANG records had very different ideas about which direction Van should go after "Brown Eyed Girl". Van ultimately got his way (and has been following his muse nearly 40 years now), but visit here

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/09/van_morrisons_c.html

for a delightful indication of his strategy for getting out of his contract with Bert Berns (earlier the writer and producer of "Here Comes The Night").

I really, really enjoy some of his stuff, while other songs leave me cold. What I go for is his mystical ones (like the title cut of "Astral Weeks", or "Common One", or much of "Veedon Fleece"), and some of the soul workouts ("Domino", "I've Been Working", "Satisfied", etc.).